So Long, and Thanks for All the Spectral Fish
Ghostcrawler confirmed the news on the official forums.

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

You know that part at the end of raid night when the final boss is dead and you’re done handing out loot and everyone kind of goes their separate ways? Yeah, this is one of those times.

We just came off of a great BlizzCon. We had so many different games to talk about, and we were thrilled at the reception of Warlords of Draenor. It was great to meet or reconnect with so many of you. I love BlizzCon dearly, which makes it so hard to tell you that this will be my last one, or at least my last one up on stage. An opportunity has come my way, and I have made the very tough decision to move on from Blizzard.

I wanted to thank all of you for being a part of this grand quest. I have said a hundred times that having passionate gamers, including the angry ones, is a far better place to be than having a community that doesn’t care. You all care. Like us, you want the game to be the best that it can be. So I ask you to keep on providing your feedback. I promise (and I rarely promise!) that the developers care very much about what you have to say.

I’ll be out there, and I can’t imagine it will be that hard to find me.

Hugs,
Ghostcrawler

P.S. No, you can’t have a pony. Or a moose. Or a mantis shrimp. Or a tardigrade. Or a crab. Keep trying though.

Oh yeah! Titan was shelved and they're back on WoW. Things are looking up.
I don't blame GC for sub loss or any of that nonsense, but I definitely think the game needs fresh people behind the scenes so I'm excited for this.

I'm willing to bet that 99% of the things you people are bitching about would've changed no matter who the lead designer was. The game wouldn't have frozen itself in amber in 2008 and refused to adapt just because the big evil GC didn't come along. Use your damn brains.

There's already a thread where they're trying to invent a conspiracy retroactively. Gold, just gold.

Exactly. Hope people get a wake up call in the future, since it is getting kind of ridiculous.

Many people say now that GC did a good job and so on (often related as GC fanboys), but what exactly you think he did good? To talk to the community in a calm matter? (whats obviously the job of every game designer and community manager). So I want to summarize shortly what I personally feel he did wrong and I dont care If you agree or not. Just sharing my opinion since I started playing WoW classic and quit the game when LFR was released.

1. Classes
GC was a balance freak. The homogenization of classes and their abilities in order to "balance" the game was a clear decision of GC. Some may say, yeah we stacked classes in sunwell and so on (before GC was lead), but I didnt have that experience myself. Neither have I seen many guilds doing this. The only guilds who could do this were the really big ones who had 5 or more good warlocks or shamans. Thats the minority.
Also, to go back a bit further in the past when I just reached lvl60 in vanilla, I really thought this game could be providing fun endlessly to me, since I had so many different classes and unique abilities to figure out. It took ages to get epic gear on 1 class, so I thought this game could take forever, If I had to have all classes being successful and in epic gear.
But now I have no motivation to start playing a new class, since everything feels the same. Homogenization is in my opinion the worst decision that could happen to WoW.

2. Quests
Since I clearly remember GC talking about daily quests and their limit back in Wotlk (25 a day), I really thought this was a bad decision again. Why? Well, why limitate quests, why not grind yourself to the top? Sure grind is boring, but remember: Almost everything was a grind in vanilla, and people still came to the game and played it. The grind made you unique, since you had those things that others didnt have. Feeling elite or unique in your own niche is a good thing!

3. Raids and Dungeons
Well I cant say that GC is responsible for Heroics being easy as shit nowadays and the LFR being a social desaster. But since he is the lead designer, he could have at least try to change the direction in the past years. Did he do so? probably not. I guess they will not remove LFR, neither make the heroics harder again. The point of no return is reached in my opinion. They should make vanilla/tbc servers after WoD (probably last expansion with lvl100), so that veterans can at least play the game they liked and dont bother playing on private vanilla/TBC servers.

Maybe Tigole can change direction, but I dont think he will come back since he is the Lead on Titan. The game is too fcked up in my opinion to change anything.

Many people say now that GC did a good job and so on (often related as GC fanboys), but what exactly you think he did good? To talk to the community in a calm matter? (whats obviously the job of every game designer and community manager). So I want to summarize shortly what I personally feel he did wrong and I dont care If you agree or not. Just sharing my opinion since I started playing WoW classic and quit the game when LFR was released.

1. Classes
GC was a balance freak. The homogenization of classes and their abilities in order to "balance" the game was a clear decision of GC. Some may say, yeah we stacked classes in sunwell and so on (before GC was lead), but I didnt have that experience myself. Neither have I seen many guilds doing this. The only guilds who could do this were the really big ones who had 5 or more good warlocks or shamans. Thats the minority.
Also, to go back a bit further in the past when I just reached lvl60 in vanilla, I really thought this game could be providing fun endlessly to me, since I had so many different classes and unique abilities to figure out. It took ages to get epic gear on 1 class, so I thought this game could take forever, If I had to have all classes being successful and in epic gear.
But now I have no motivation to start playing a new class, since everything feels the same. Homogenization is in my opinion the worst decision that could happen to WoW.

2. Quests
Since I clearly remember GC talking about daily quests and their limit back in Wotlk (25 a day), I really thought this was a bad decision again. Why? Well, why limitate quests, why not grind yourself to the top? Sure grind is boring, but remember: Almost everything was a grind in vanilla, and people still came to the game and played it. The grind made you unique, since you had those things that others didnt have. Feeling elite or unique in your own niche is a good thing!

3. Raids and Dungeons
Well I cant say that GC is responsible for Heroics being easy as shit nowadays and the LFR being a social desaster. But since he is the lead designer, he could have at least try to change the direction in the past years. Did he do so? probably not. I guess they will not remove LFR, neither make the heroics harder again. The point of no return is reached in my opinion. They should make vanilla/tbc servers after WoD (probably last expansion with lvl100), so that veterans can at least play the game they liked and dont bother playing on private vanilla/TBC servers.

Maybe Tigole can change direction, but I dont think he will come back since he is the Lead on Titan. The game is too fcked up in my opinion to change anything.

I actually made an account just to point out the level of fail in your post... Titan has been scrapped, and it has been scrapped for a while. You are obviously severely misinformed and most of your post highlights that very well. I have no real feelings about GC leaving because he's just one man on a team of developers. He was the Wow Forum's face of Blizzard for a long time, and it caused him to get blamed for pretty much everything that people hate.

Now, if he goes to another game, and all of a sudden that game starts loosing subscribers or gets "worse" we could talk about how he was the reason that wow has "diminished". Untill that point, I wish the man luck in all his endevors

I actually made an account just to point out the level of fail in your post... Titan has been scrapped, and it has been scrapped for a while. You are obviously severely misinformed and most of your post highlights that very well. I have no real feelings about GC leaving because he's just one man on a team of developers. He was the Wow Forum's face of Blizzard for a long time, and it caused him to get blamed for pretty much everything that people hate.

Now, if he goes to another game, and all of a sudden that game starts loosing subscribers or gets "worse" we could talk about how he was the reason that wow has "diminished". Untill that point, I wish the man luck in all his endevors

Titan isnt fully scrapped, they scrapped the current state of that game, to point out how misinformed you are. There are still 30 developers working on the game, and remember: WoW has been rebooted the same way before release. The core titan team is still working on it, or have you seen Tigole on some other project yet? Well I'm not.